Dear Kontemplation newsletter recipient.

It's a special feeling to write a newsletter for Kontemplation. Like writing to acquaintances.

It also means that you can perhaps allow yourself to be a little more personal than usual. That it is possible to share experiences that are only suitable for a smaller and closer group.
I would like to share two such: Both are events that took place this summer, during the retreats Kontemplation has held at the magical beach farm Øster Løkke, in a landscape that is at once magnificently desolate, windswept, pressed down by the wind and the sea, and at the same time confidentially intimate and spontaneously peaceful:

In that landscape, Hanneli encountered a puma one morning.
It was a special morning in many ways, very early, at five o'clock, there was a fog over Øster Løkke, out of the haze grew the white rainbow you can see in the photo above.
And a little later, by the road leading inland from Trans Church, the puma stood by the roadside, three to four times the size of the largest house cat, with the long tail characteristic of wild cats, and was about to devour some prey. When it sensed Hanneli, it turned towards her, with the alertness of a wild animal, and then it had disappeared into the cornfield.
If it had been anyone else who had told me about the experience, I would have doubted it. But Hanneli is an expert in animals in her own way. We googled 'Big cats by the North Sea'. And saw that puma have been observed in West Jutland a number of times over the past year.

The next day, our retreat assistant, Lasse, Nina who participated in the retreat (and was the one who spotted the gannet) and I had the terrified joy of freeing a gannet, a large bird, a specialized diver with a beak like a dagger, from a nylon fishing net it had become entangled in.

The puma and the gannet are, on the one hand, unusual. And yet not. The North Sea is a wild sea. And Øster Løkke at the same time protected and wild.
As the retreat form is in a way. What we are looking for on retreat is a deeper connection with our own nature. The natural wakefulness, the natural warmth, the natural intensity of life. When we lead in that way, we will often find that the outer world responds back, sometimes in extraordinary ways.

One of the other extraordinary experiences of the summer was for us the couples retreat '’Love and contemplation’'. Which we have been working towards for seven years. And which you can read more about at the blog.

Now it is late summer, we are heading towards the fall teaching. And already looking forward to next summer at Øster Løkke. Contemplative teaching that aims for the projectless now cannot take place without careful planning. It is a paradox. And it is also a joy to look forward in this way.
It is also a joy that Hanneli's meditation’The open presence’', recorded on the beach next to Øster Løkke, now available for free use in the practice library. When I listen to it, I can feel that it's still summer.

Warm greetings to you all,

on behalf of the entire Kontemplation team

Peter Hoeg